dan/california
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Posts posted by dan/california
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"Well when it comes to air defences the guys at Jane’s recon that losses for NATO could be as high as 2% when up against current generation Russian air defences. This may not sound a lot but it would be a show stopper for air in support of ground operations. Manned air assets anyway."
All valid points but.
Two related issues, the first is whether or not that loss rate is maintained over time. Or are the air defenses degraded over the course of the opening week to the point of complete ineffectiveness?
The second point is that anyone who really knows the answer the first question would probably spend quite a while in prison if they talked about it on a public board.
It is also probably worth pointing out that strategic level radars and missile systems take a much higher grade of operator and maintenance tech than an RPG 29. The actual Russian military may have those people, but is VERY unclear if most of the other people operating their stuff do.
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It kicked my rear end twice. It would help immensely if their was a little bit of running room behind the Americans. A stryker recon platoon is not going to keep advancing into the better part of a mechanized company.
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Until there is some evidence that the the Syrian air defense system would actually work, the assumption has to be that they would get hammered. As mentioned above the Israeli's took out the reactor site without a missile being fired. That was not the only time they have demonstrated the ability to overfly Syria at will either.
Thus the assumption that the U.S. Air-Force would have absolute air supremacy in a matter of days seems quite valid until there is some actual evidence otherwise.
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AKD is making far to much sense with this one if it is doable with reasonable programming effort.
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1. Is the game lopsided in favor of the Americans or can the Syrians put up a real challenge? Not in well designed scenarios.
The game, like the real world is very unforgiving, if you try to run your Abrams past a Syrian squad without suppressing first they will cheerfully shoot you in the rear with an RPG and ruin your day. On the other hand, and this is also realistic, if you attempt to frontally assault a couple of Abrams, even with the better part of a company of Syrian armour, the scrap metal dealers will be very grateful.
The scoring system also allows for almost infinite balancing of scenarios.
2. Does the WEGO still work well or do most people play it Real Time? Why do you play it the way you do?
WEGO has improved with every patch, but I still play real time most of the time because the AI will just do silly things occasionally. With further AI improvements in the 1.1 patch WEGO may finally be over the hump.
3. What videos would you recommend I watch to get a better feel for the game on Youtube if there are any? I see the AAR videos, but I'm not quite sure what I'm watching to be honest.
Play the demo, all of the videos assume you have some idea what is happening.
3. What was the biggest problem at launch and how has it been addressed (or not) in your opinion?
The game was extremely buggy at launch. The unit level AI was barely functional at all, among many other problems. It has improved by orders of magnitude. Now, if you give sensible orders and understand how differnt commands interact with each other you will spend most of your time thinking that your pixeltruppen are behaving sensibly. Again I expect further improvements with the next patch.
4. What was the biggest problem at launch and how has it been addressed (or not) in your opinion?
At launch they were to numerous to list. My understanding is that BFC was in a contract squeeze of some description and simply couldn't wait any longer. There are whole threads on this issue.
Single player real time now works very, very well.
Currently,the multi player options are still limited and require more fiddling than is ideal. You can play WEGO by PBEM but not head to head continously.
5. How well does the game support/simulate MOUT gaming? Is it still focused like CM 1x on open terrain or does the system appropriate adjust?
The game was written with MOUT gaming in mind and as of 1.08 generally simulates it very well. You can read endless complaints about little stuff on this board, I have written a few of them, but mostly at this point they are little stuff. And it all gets better every patch.
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The single biggest improvement they could make in the interface would be to have some of this information displayed on the unit icons that they already have. Flashing red for taking casualties, flashing yellow for suppression, and some kind of signal for outgoing fire come immediately to mind. As C3K says this information would come up on the company and/or platoon com nets almost instantly.
At the current time the icons probably give us too little information about our own units, and too much about the enemies'.
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What would actually be better is a "fire one round command" that could be queued with a movement orders. So a tank could appear from cover, fire one round, and reverse back into cover in a single set of orders. It would have a great many other uses as well.
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My understanding is that most individual scenarios can be uploaded in the Editor and modified as you wish. Campaigns however are essentially sealed files and cannot be modified.
Cheers
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Well, a U.S.-Russian clash in either the Caucuses or the Ukraine just got a whole lot easier to work up the back story for.
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I teach high school for a living and the cruelty of this module coming out at the busiest time of my year is just unreasonable.
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Pre-ordered, can't wait!
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I was always going to pre-order this module, but now I am dying to actually get my hands on it.
Any word on trigger/condition based plans for the AI? As badly as I hate the thought of George Mc's scenarios making me look even more like an idiot, they really would help.
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Now I know why some of those Syrian buildings are so hard to knock down, they have 100 ft plus deep foundations.
The FAC must have misidentified the target as Assad's bunker
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I'll buy whatever they are turning out. BF has the best customer support in the world, period.
I just wish they would hire some overseas support for the grunt level coding, but I realize that is a lot easier and cheaper to say than it is to do.
While we are talking about long term questions how long will it be before the engine takes advantage of multiple core processors in a major way? I am considering a new computer and wouldn't mind knowing whether to go with two cores or four.
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That light bulb blowing up over my head didn't hurt at all.
Maybe they will have time to sort out the manual for the Marine module.
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If they are going to model additional arty rounds that are appropriate this scale the best thing would be Excalibur. A ten meter error radius with the first round is exactly what you want close to friendly troops. And it won't melt video cards the way modeling smoke would.
It is after all specifically and expensive designed to avoid all the problems with DPICM discussed above.
Is the army still using single fuse DPICM or have the switched to the dual fuse models? My understanding is that their dud rate is much lower.
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Actually the right density of trees around a building are currently the most effective form of fortification in the game. They can soak up virtually any quantity of 25mm fire and a lot more main gun rounds than I want to spend.
I have seen this strongly in the process of getting my head handed to me in Hammertime.
The building seems to absorb the fragments and mitigate the air burst effect.
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The only disadvantage I see for tusk on the M1 is a slightly higher profile. Given the fits that the Israelis had with Hezbollah ATGMs I would think they would want the reactive armor regardless of weight. It will break most bridges as is, so what is the disadvantage?
The other vehicles mentioned the additional weight is a far higher percentage of their original design weight and I completely agree that the drive train maintenance issues are significant.
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Steve has stated that some ability for the AI to respond to conditions on the ground is a fairly high priority for future development.
Even basic instructions like " Attack when X number of enemy units reach zone Y" would make a huge difference.
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The only real solution is multiple players per side who then have to communicate what building they want obliterated to their compatriot in charge of the tank platoon.
With very small tweaks to the relative spotting system as currently implemented this will provide more realism than most people can stand.
The AARs should be fascinating reading. As in train wreck fascinating. I can't wait. :eek:
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The reds had an ATGM team on a roof in Hammertime v1005 and I wanted it to go away. I had Three Bradleys shooting at the roof, some targeting the actual ATGM team and some on area fire and it would not die. I literally spent a 100 rounds of 25mm trying to blitz these guys and then had to use 120mm.
I recall Steve saying something about tweaking the roof protective values being adjusted for small arms, but I also recall hims saying that Bradleys should turn a building into swiss cheese. I am just curious if anyone else has seen this.
[ April 17, 2008, 10:19 PM: Message edited by: dan/california ]
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Ha! Nice find Slowmotion. I don't care how much that sucker carries until it's NOT a gas powered "hey everybody shoot me over here" monstrousity. It's a hell of a long way off.
I caught this vid the other day on Military.com/QUOTE]
There are a great many uses for something like this actually. Like sending it into a potentially hostile farmstead from a bearing that doesn't coincide with your own and seeing if anyone wants to reveal their location by shooting at it for instance. If it had a camera and a remote controlled 5.56mm machine gun, they would have to shoot at it.
It is much easer to write requisition for a new robot and some mortar rounds than a letter to some soldiers family.
I just got a couple of pixel troopers shot checking out a farmstead in Hammertime under those exact circumstances as a matter of fact.
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I finally got to play some 1.08 this weekend and I think the game is truly maturing.
However, I noticed that couple of scenarios that used to be very difficult have become much easier. "Housecleaning" was kicking my rear end the last time I tired to play it a couple of weeks ago, and I just ran thru it with about 3 casualties( as blue on real time, elite). A lot of bad guys are now showing up as routed. This not necessarily a bug, in fact it makes sense. However it means a lot off scenarios may need to be rebalanced.
Some this is also do to better TAC AI which means that less of my guys get shot doing things that truly make no sense, but it still affects the game balance.
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I finally got to play some 1.08 this weekend and I think the game is truly maturing.
However, I noticed that couple of scenarios that used to be very difficult have become much easier. "Housecleaning" was kicking my rear end the last time I tired to play it a couple of weeks ago, and I just ran thru it with about 3 casualties( as blue on real time, elite). A lot of bad guys are now showing up as routed. This not necessarily a bug, in fact it makes sense. However it means a lot off scenarios may need to be rebalanced.
Some this is also do to better TAC AI which means that less of my guys get shot doing things that truly make no sense, but it still affects the game balance.
Better visual damage representation
in Combat Mission Shock Force 1
Posted
Steve talked about this a while back. As I understood it some damage indication for buildings was a moderately high priority, but better damage graphics and or physics for vehicles just seemed like a lot of trouble for something that would have no effect on gameplay.